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Thursday, January 12, 2017

An Empirical Look at 2016's Top Metal Releases

Just like we did for 2015 and 2014, Contaminated Tones has gathered up a bunch of data on what people generally think the best albums are for 2016. The data this year is from 37 different year end lists/polls. While not scientifically rigorous, this is probably the broadest data available on what people "think" is the best, along with information on information on which sub-genres were most popular and what labels did best in terms highly regarded albums.

Orion: One thing to note this year, is that it was fairly difficult to find dedicated lists that fit the guidelines of our year end analysis. In 2014, Apteronotus worked off of 40 lists and in 2015, 47 lists were used. Compiling the lists this year was increasingly difficult as I noticed a decisive drop in the amount of blogs, sites, and zines that were putting out best of lists for the year. 37 lists were available at the close of December, 2016 including those that were last minute additions to the data set. Whether this number is a sign of an overall drop in coverage of the genre or an outlier will be a question to review next year.

Top 2016 Metal Releases:

This graph shows the top 23 metal releases for 2016, based on what percentage of lists the release appeared on in the data. Only bands clearing the 10% threshold are shown. These top 23 bands comprised 35% of the top ten list occurrences, and the top 8 bands comprised 18% of the occurrences (both of these figures indicate a more diverse field of bands compared to 2015 and 2014).

Khemmis's Hunted took the top spot this year, appearing on 29.7% of the lists, which for comparison was essentially identical to how popular Ghost's Meliora was in 2015.

This graphs shows a breakdown of the same data while looking at the sub-genre of the entries. The numbers add up to over 100% because bands can have more than one genre. Having multiple genres was the most common arrangement this year by a fair margin at 31.5%, which is on par with 2015's figure of 30.25% for the same variable.

Overall, black and death metal continue to be the most popular genres, at rates comparable to last year. You'll notice that non-metal releases were more popular than many of the other sub-genres. Non-metal releases were similar to 2014's 12% rate, at 12.9%, and down from 2015's 17% rate. A pretty interesting trend toward stability in the data. Thrash and progressive metal however are both up compared to last year.

Orion: One trend to notice is the attention paid to the Heavy Metal and Power Metal genres. Power Metal has had poor showing three years in a row, but a consistent rise is notable, with 2.25% of the overall selection in 2014, 4.26% in 2015, and 6.9% in 2016. This trend is one to take notice of; over the past few years, interest in US Power Metal in particular has increased, with notable Germany-style festivals appearing in the US. Death Metal, in contrast, seems to be on the decline the past three years with 35.25%, 23.62%, and 21.8% showings in 2014, 2015, and 2016 respectively. I wonder if this can be correlated with the changing composition of Maryland Deathfest, arguably the largest metal festival in the US. The inclusion of more USPM bands, Doom bands, and Heavy Metal bands in their roster has been notable over the past four or five years.

As explained in the methodology below, genre information, including metal versus non-metal, was decided using the Metal Archives, rather than relying on the opinion of anyone at Contaminated Tones.

Top 2016 Record Labels:

This final graph shows which labels were most common on year end lists, representing each label as a percentage of the total possible spots. In other words, a 100% means that a label released every release on every single top ten list etc. Unlike previous years, where Nuclear Blast and Century Media were neck and neck, Century Media had a bit of a decline in popularity in regards to top releases. Keep in mind that there can be a lot of variability in a label's release schedule. This is perhaps best illustrated by Season of Mist's jump from the 14th most dominant label in last year's data up to second.

No label data was attached for non-metal bands, and this fact in conjunction with the entire point of the research (top ten lists only) means that these figures should not be read as reflecting total sales of any particular label for a certain year. The above 20 bands took up 58.38% of the available year end list slots. From an economics standpoint, this data is highly competitive, and more competitive than the prior two years with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index of .0223. This indicates a diverse field of labels, similar to the top spots for individual bands. Interestingly, this happened while unsigned/independent bands dropped in frequency compared to last year.

Methodology:

Information on genres, whether a band was metal or not, and label data were pulled from the Metal Archives.

No bands were excluded for not being metal. If a list included a band, we included it. Otherwise we may as well just be posting our own lists.

Only the top 10 from any list were included. This was done to have some continuity across websites in terms of the weight of their data. We excluded sites with lists of less than 10; this way each website is on equal footing.

Since different websites can have in-house tastes, websites with multiple lists were selected only once, and at random.

Other than looking at only the top 10, rankings were not considered or averaged. Rankings like these are what is known as ordinal data and typically cannot be averaged in a meaningful way.

As a quick example, suppose List 1’s author thinks we had a weak year and would rate their #9 album at 73/100 and their #2 spot only 75/100. We can’t meaningfully compare this with List 2’s author rating their #9 album a 80/100 and their #2 100/100 because we have only rankings, and not ratings.

No individual website’s list is reproduced here, neither is the entire dataset.

Label data was gathered only for metal bands. It’s also important to keep in mind that not every label releases music every year.

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Contaminated Tones explores the boundaries of the listening experience through reviews, articles, and interviews with artists from myriad genres. Additionally, Contaminated Tones acts as an outlet for recordings of varying intensities and forms. We write out of Old Bridge NJ, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Explore the infinite underground of metal, noise, and experimental music with us. CONTACT:Email: Orion_M (For Orders)Email: ApteronotusFacebook: CTP FB